


running in the street

by goshemily



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Rock Band, F/M, M/M, Multi, Oral Sex, Punk Rock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-21
Updated: 2013-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-05 08:31:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1091797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goshemily/pseuds/goshemily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The crowd is thicker than before, and the room hotter. Grantaire’s mouth tastes like copper. Bahorel nods at him, spiked jacket slung over his shoulder, and Grantaire nods back, and waits.</p><p>They come on like the soldiers Enjolras named them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	running in the street

**Author's Note:**

  * For [1001paperboxes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/1001paperboxes/gifts).



> Thank you so much to [harborshore](http://archiveofourown.org/users/harborshore), [andsparkles](http://archiveofourown.org/users/andsparkles), and [miss_begonia](http://archiveofourown.org/users/miss_begonia) for betaing - and to [acchikocchi](http://archiveofourown.org/users/acchikocchi) for some very timely hand-holding. <3
> 
> Happy New Year and best wishes, [1001paperboxes](http://archiveofourown.org/users/1001paperboxes)!

“We’re going to a concert, and you should come.”

“Go without me. There’s nothing for me tonight but the moon, the river, and my friend here,” Grantaire says, and taps his bottle against Joly’s cup.

“No, R, we want you feeling capital. We _insist_ you join us,” Joly says, cajoling and imperious.

Bossuet smiles as though nothing would make him happier.

“But will you have me not properly attired?” Grantaire asks, and squints at his stained trousers. They’re sat at the tip of the Île Saint Louis, watching the Seine and waving at passing bateaux mouches, and even in this light he can make out his own dishevelment, and Joly’s pristine leather pants.

“I’ll have you any way you like,” Joly says, and hooks their arms together.

“A last drink before we go, then, if I must –”

“You must,” Bossuet says.

“– and you know I cannot bear to disappoint you. Gentlemen, your cups.” Grantaire pours a quarter of what’s left for both of them, and finishes the bottle himself as they climb to the Pont Marie.

“I think you’ll like them,” Bossuet offers. “They’re friends.”

“A friend of yours, etc.,” says Grantaire, and looks around for somewhere to leave the bottle, “but Laigle, eagles are not known for their taste in song. Their taste in songbirds, that I might grant you.”

“They’re certainly pretty enough, if that’s what you’re after.”

The Boulevard Saint Michel is not easy to stroll along; harried students wend through tourists in the daytime, and at night the cafés spill onto the sidewalks. Joly keeps his arm linked in Grantaire’s as they do a kind of crab-shuffle and the crowd parts, and Bossuet walks in the gutter, trying to text and watch for traffic at the same time.

“Musichetta’s meeting us there.”

Grantaire manages to smile a bit at that. “The dimpled wonder? Why didn’t you say so sooner?”

“Look, there they are!” Joly pulls Grantaire behind him, and they nimbly avoid a run-in with a rack of postcards and a man carrying a baguette.

Bahorel and Prouvaire wait with Musichetta next to the basement entrance of something called the Café Musain. Grantaire looks at what they’re wearing and frowns. “What sort of band is it, exactly?”

“Not sure they’re anything _exactly_ , but I’d call them hardcore punk,” Bossuet says cheerfully. “What did you expect?”

Bahorel’s mohawk is freshly spiked and his vest is covered in political pins ( _change is now_ ; _say it with paving stones!_ ), and Musichetta has her Docs on. Jean Prouvaire always wears severe black, but tonight he looks especially determined.

“You know this kind of scene isn’t for me,” Grantaire says quietly to Joly as Musichetta kisses Bossuet’s cheeks.

“You don’t have to believe in it,” Joly says. “I just want you to see them.”

Grantaire nods a greeting at everyone and they pay the bouncer, troop down a flight of steps and through the actual café and then Joly’s pushing Grantaire down a long hallway, and he can feel the bass under his feet already. He’s never been to the Musain but his body knows what to expect.

Bahorel pulls open a door and Grantaire’s hit by damp heat like a blow and he squints. There’s already a band on, the singer too loud to make out any words.

“This isn’t them,” Bahorel says. “They’re on next.”

Grantaire nods and makes his way to the tiny bar at the side and yells an order over the music.

The Musain is full, and after the first band it gets even fuller. He waits against the wall, watching everything. He pretends not to see the worried glances Bossuet doesn’t hide. It’s been awhile since Grantaire was at a show like this. Bahorel comes to lean next to him, and knocks his shoulder companionably. A conspiracy of kindness, his friends are.

It gets hotter in the club. Grantaire’s shirt is sticking to his back, and everything’s a bit too loud and too close.

Finally the band walks onto the small stage. There’s no talk. The bassist wears a Communist party cap and he starts, insistent and compelling and Grantaire doesn’t want to be moved but his stomach drops with the beat. The kickdrum comes in, low and centering. The guitarist is focused, grinning to himself as he leads the crowd toward something.

The singer waits before a standing microphone, head down and shoulders squared, blond hair hiding his face. Grantaire breathes with the drums and watches him, looks at the line of his hips in red leather pants tighter than Joly’s and his black boots solid as a challenge. He’s got a safety pin in his ear and “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS” written in marker above a crudely-drawn handgun on his shirt.

He lifts his head, looks straight at the crowd, and howls.

The band is so fucking angry. It’s in their words, it’s in the way the guitarist smiles and the drummer’s dripping sweat, it’s in the precision of the bass and the way the singer says “This is for the National Front” and spits on the stage. It’s in their eyes, and in the way Grantaire watches the mosh pit surge and break and come together in front of him. It’s in the way the singer believes in what he’s saying. It almost makes Grantaire afraid, how much the singer believes, except that a belief so pure is something almost holy.

The singer stretches out his hands, posed before them, and Grantaire thinks it might even be an unconscious allusion.

“Everyone loves a good Christ metaphor,” Bahorel murmurs in his ear.

“No, not Christ,” says Grantaire, too aware with his heart echoing the bass the attractions of martyrdom, “an archangel.”

“I did not come to bring peace,” says the singer, and Bahorel laughs loudly at Grantaire.

Grantaire says nothing.

“Those motherfuckers,” the singer growls, “they don’t know you like I do. They don’t know what you can do like I know. Show them. Rage, children, rage."

This one thing Grantaire can do. He knows the city, though it’s not home; he knows its parts and its perversions and its poverty. He can rage.

He pushes away from the wall, away from Bahorel and Joly’s careful eyes, and slips through the dancing bodies into the pit before the stage. He breathes, waits, moves, wills himself to be hit by the crowd. He wills himself to be taken out of his body. He wills more crowd-surfers, body-slammers, angry hands, bruises. It’s too hot to breathe, and he gasps for air during a bridge. His mouth falls open during a chorus even though he doesn’t know the words and doesn’t want to echo them. Everyone’s getting their sweat on each other. The smell would be unbearable if he cared. There’s no eye to the storm but the singer is the locus of everything in the room.

“Fuck them,” the singer sings, “we are soldiers.”

It’s not a rallying cry, goddammit – Grantaire takes an elbow to the chin and gives back, gives back, gives back, sweat at the dip of his spine and writhing with it, the bass in his feet and his heart and his blood – but it’s loud and it’s here and it’s present. They’re stupid, he thinks viciously, mouth deliberately closed now, and pushes off someone’s back, the band is _idiotic_ – another shove – but the drums are so insistent and the singer smiles like he knows it’s not enough and Grantaire is anchored to his body by the pit and in his anger and his exaltation he feels _fucking_ alive.

The song ends and the pit shudders to a stop. The guitarist nods at them like he’s calm and flicks hair out of his eyes. The singer pulls off his shirt and uses it to wipe his face. He’s beautiful and terrible, a Rodin that’s all religious ecstasy and no tenderness.

“We are Raise the Flag,” he says into the microphone. “Remember this: revolution is an act of love.”

The band leaves the stage.

*

Grantaire comes back to himself to find he’s heaving. Sweat is soaking his shirt. He’s more a mess even than usual, and he almost resents it, but he can’t.

“Well?” Musichetta comes up beside him to ask. Her pompadour’s come down a bit, but her eyes sparkle. Her dimples are in full force.

Grantaire grins at her.

“They’ve got their first album out soon,” she says. “ _Citizens!_ ; it’s coming out on Les Amis.”

Grantaire knows the label. It’s a political imprint. “Too bad,” he says. “They’ll be disappointed all the sooner.”

Musichetta hums, not exactly an agreement, and pulls him back to the group.

“All I’m saying,” Bossuet’s declaiming to anyone who will listen, which is to say very few, “is that if they would consider indigenous property rights as sacrosanct under the UN Charter, then we’d get a lot farther in questions of –”

“No one cares,” Grantaire interrupts to tell him.

“Some do,” he hears behind him, and turns to see the band. The singer goes around him and kisses Bossuet’s cheeks and slings an arm around his shoulders, and stands regarding Grantaire. He’s very tall. 

“Grantaire, meet Enjolras,” says Bossuet.

Enjolras offers his free hand; it’s dry, even though sweat shows through the shirt he’s put back on.

Grantaire swallows. They shake quickly.

“Feuilly’s in the hat, Combeferre’s just there, and –”

“Hello, I’m Courfeyrac,” says the drummer. He kisses Grantaire’s cheeks before Grantaire can even wonder what to do, and grins fit to burst.

“Hello,” Grantaire says weakly. They’re all four very attractive. All of his friends are, sunny dispositions writ large on happy faces, but his eyes slide back to Enjolras. His hair is almost a curtain over his face, and Grantaire finds he wants nothing so much as to touch it.

“We’ve got a weekly engagement,” Courfeyrac tells them all. “Found out tonight. You should come back.”

“Congratulations,” Grantaire says, and means it.

“More chances for people to listen,” Enjolras points out. He looks meaningfully at Grantaire, like he’s trying to take his measure.

The room’s emptied but for the ten of them, Grantaire realizes. “Are you so sure they want to hear what you’re preaching?” he asks.

“ _You_ did. I saw you well enough from the stage.”

Grantaire laughs. “I liked to hear you preach more than I liked your subject.” He looks around; the bar’s been shut down. “You sing revolution like it’s a new thing, but there’s nothing new under the sun.”

Enjolras manages a graceful shrug. “I don’t disagree. Continual revolution is the only path, and we learn from what came before.”

“Such devotion to history, but you haven’t learned its lessons! The only certainties,” Grantaire hears his voice getting louder, can’t help it, “are humanity wretched and my full glass.”

“You haven’t got one right now,” Enjolras says. His eyes spark, and his hand twitches at Bossuet’s collar. Grantaire wonders what it would feel like wrapped in his hair. “I think you’re wrong about the other, too.”

“What do you think a punk band can do?”

“What do you think indifference can do?”

“Not indifference,” Grantaire says. Bossuet looks troubled. “Only resignation. Nature in her wildness is more perfect than we will ever be, and man wrecks her; despots rise and fall like an inane symphony – only look to Russia to see how progress is a lie, how history repeats! I’ll take a drinking song over mad priests any day.”

“Am I a mad priest, then?” Enjolras’s grin is sharp.

“I don’t think you’d object to a cult of personality, anyway.”

Enjolras shrugs again, untouchable. “We’re all just brothers,” he says, and leads them out of the Musain.

*

Morning is bright in Paris, and the sun is agreeable where Grantaire leans against the stone of Saint Julien Le Pauvre. It’s one of the oldest churches in the city; he knows that in his bones. Prayers have been offered here.

He looks across the Seine at the towers of Notre Dame, Our Lady, seeing how beautiful she is, and how cold. How imposing. She is an ascetic’s gift to God. She is too serene, rising above the struggle.

Saint Julien is different. The church crouches low and humble, listening to its parish.

Grantaire doesn’t pray. Instead, he pushes off the wall and he walks.

To walk a city is to understand a city. Grantaire knows every bar and thought before last night that he knew every café; he knows every bookshop and gallery and hidden vista, every beggar and businessman. He knows this city and it leaves him homesick to watch the ghosts of the past every time he rounds a corner. Paris is many cities gathered to herself, and in the act of walking Grantaire sees them all.

He goes to the Jardin des Tuileries and finds Prouvaire smoking in the melancholy shadow of a large tree.

Prouvaire exhales slowly. “I’d offer a penny for your thoughts, but I suspect you’d say they’re not worth so much.”

“You know I think on my feet. They’re nimble, but they tend to roam.”

Prouvaire nods. “Are the wanderers all gone?” He inhales deeply, holds, breathes out, and answers himself. “No, they’re not – not even in these base days where consumption is prized above adventure.”

“Spending is a sickness, of course, but at least a bit more pleasurable than coughing your lungs out, don’t you think?”

“I am not too high for your puns,” Prouvaire says. “A little low humor for us all, then. What did you think of our friends last night?”

Grantaire laughs. “Are they my friends now, too? I thought Enjolras would eat me.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Grantaire’s silent. It’s answer enough.

“They reach toward a future, you know, and that’s not such a bad thing.”

“They convinced me of their conviction in it, anyway.”

“And you can’t see the future he sings about?” Prouvaire smiles dreamily, and brushes his hair back with exquisite black lacquered nails. “I can.”

“Jehan.” Grantaire claps him on the shoulder, and keeps walking. He circles the city with a vague sense he should do good, but that’s hard when all he can see is the grime between the few cobblestones the government hasn’t torn up, all he can remember are those things that have happened in these streets before – in that corner a child was hungry, there last week Grantaire himself bought wine instead of paint – and he binds the city to himself with his feet, and it will disorder itself to his wishes, give him hours of exploration, but it’s not a joy.

*

A week later, Grantaire finds himself back at the Musain. It’s not so much a conscious choice as that the city pulled him here, streets unspooling themselves like Ariadne’s thread – an unhelpful metaphor, he thinks, because Enjolras is no Minotaur, and Grantaire is no Theseus.

The crowd is thicker than before, and the room hotter. Grantaire’s mouth tastes like copper. Bahorel nods at him, spiked jacket slung over his shoulder, and Grantaire nods back, and waits.

They come on like the soldiers Enjolras named them. There’s no mercy in these songs, and the pit knows it. It breaks wide open from the first chorus and doesn’t let up. Grantaire looks at Feuilly’s determined face and Courfeyrac’s merry one and Enjolras making himself a beacon and he throws himself in. 

There’s no pause until after the fifth song.

“We are Raise the Flag,” Combeferre says while Enjolras stares at the room. His shirt is off, and his hair is burnished gold with sweat.

“This one is called ‘Protest of Corpses,’” he says into the microphone. “Sell yourselves dearly.”

The bass starts low, a thrumming pulse, and Courfeyrac’s snare is military. 

“One word more,” Enjolras begins to chant. “One word more, one word more, one word more –” the crowd catches it and throws it back, Grantaire’s mouth closed but everyone else’s open, “one word more, _fight_ –” Enjolras’s voice gets louder and louder and the crowd is jumping in time now, fists in the air, and Grantaire jumps with them. “Die with me, in this dawn –” and he’s howling possessed, bent at the waist and screaming over a wave of feedback and Grantaire wants to cover his ears but he can’t because his fist is raised too, unbidden, and in this moment he’s lifted up and he’s whole.

The song shifts and someone slams into his back and the pit starts whirling, and he thrashes and this is whole too, this is contact body to body and electricity, and every time Grantaire’s almost knocked from the pit he knocks himself back in, chooses this over and over, to be beat into his body and out of his head. Pain is an anchor. Over it all, Enjolras keeps singing.

Then, a caesura, Enjolras holds them to him with his hands outstretched while Courfeyrac and Feuilly keep playing the march quietly. “Citizens,” he says, poised on top of Courfeyrac’s kickdrum like he has all the time in the world before the final bridge, lit incandescent red by the stage lights, “heat the furnace in the promise of tomorrow. We are the kindling. This is possible.”

He steps down, looks gravely at the crowd, to Combeferre at his right, breathes, then hurls himself off the stage and is caught, hallowed, by outstretched hands.

He lets them put him down and he stands watching them all, looking them in the eyes, letting the bass and the snare grow behind him, too righteous to be human, and Grantaire is right in front of him sweaty and panting and drops his head.

He feels a hand in his hair and Enjolras yanks his head up and holds him there face to face, Grantaire overwhelmed, Enjolras glowing, and Enjolras twists his hand. “Will you do what I ask?” he wants to know.

Grantaire can’t nod against how tightly Enjolras holds him. “I’d do anything,” he says.

Enjolras drops his hand and turns back to the stage.

*

Saturdays mean lunch above the busy trains of Châtelet-Les Halles, the chance to lazily observe hurriers. Grantaire strolls towards the Corinthe and the city adjusts itself accordingly; he approaches from the Bourse de Commerce side, passing the giant dome and hearing the echo of ancient merchants. Children play in the fountains of Saint Eustache and the Jardin des Halles, shrieking and splashing each other while their guardians read newspapers in the sun.

Bossuet leans in the restaurant doorway waiting for him. His shoulders are relaxed and he looks content with his lot. He stretches slowly.

“Laigle, how is your perch?” Grantaire calls.

“The better for a crowded eyrie,” Bossuet says, and winks.

Inside, Joly and Musichetta sit perfectly dressed like always. Bossuet’s jacket owes its holes less to art than to nature, but the three of them suit: Joly wraps a companionable arm around Bossuet, and Musichetta watches them fondly.

Grantaire scoots closer to the table.

“Oysters, cheese, and ham,” Bossuet says to a waiter.

“Tea, please,” for Musichetta.

“Champagne,” Joly says repressively. “And how are you?” to Grantaire.

“Oh, well. Tired as the day is long. It is long, you know – Sisyphus is king of infinite nutshells compared to me; I have bad dreams.”

Joly offers a pen and paper from his bag. Grantaire smiles, and tucks his feet behind his chair legs. Today he’s wearing mismatched Christmas socks, blasphemy to the season but a nod to his friends. Every year Joly gives him something bright to keep in his drawers.

Time flows as he draws.

“I miss Father Hucheloup,” Bossuet says, looking sadly at the limp omelet he’s brought, and the lack of oysters. They all miss him, a big man with a big beard and scene cred (the only way to get such a name), and moreover a wonderful cook. They come here now more from loyalty than appetite.

“Share and share alike,” Musichetta says, eyes twinkling as she steals Joly’s champagne and hands the glass to Bossuet.

“Would you like this omelet, then?”

“No, darling.”

“You came back for another concert,” Joly says, and taps Grantaire on the back of his head where he’s bent over the table sketching the four of them toasting each other.

“Maybe I like mad priests after all,” he mutters.

After lunch he sits watching the elevators go up and down at the Centre Pompidou and listening to the bells that tolled against the Huguenots from the church of Saint Germain behind him, and recants.

*

They coalesce, as spring turns to summer. Grantaire explores gardens with Courfeyrac and Jehan both, and sometimes Courfeyrac’s roommate Marius. He goes to an exhibition of old scientific drawings with Combeferre, and finds him knowledgeable. He watches Enjolras shine, and thinks Tantalus never knew the meaning of want.

The brightest part of Enjolras isn’t his golden hair or his razor grin, but his belief, a light in the dark places. Or it would be, Grantaire thinks, and avoids the entrance to the catacombs on his way to meet Feuilly, if the dark places wouldn’t shun him. He cannot trust Enjolras will build a movement when the one thing Grantaire knows is the pettiness of human nature.

“Oh, have some faith,” Feuilly tells him.

Grantaire laughs. “In what?”

“Not human honor, fine, but at least that _we’ll_ keep trying.”

“I’d never doubt you, I promise.”

They take the metro together to a party at Bahorel’s, and while their train waits at Concorde, Grantaire idly reads the Declaration of the Rights of Man on the wall. He gets to “No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions” before the train starts to move; as they enter the tunnel, all he can do is laugh.

The party’s already started when they arrive, and Grantaire would be a liar if he pretended not to notice Enjolras talking with Courfeyrac. Grantaire’s helpless, holding a glass of wine in the kitchen and struck by the light on Enjolras’s face; he has nothing to offer that Enjolras could possibly need, and it leaves him hollow.

“Where’s Bahorel?” Joly asks.

There’s laughter from behind a shut door, and Grantaire edges over to it. “You’ve been missed,” he says, just loud enough that no one else hears.

“Not where I’m needed most,” comes back muffled, and someone laughs again.

“You think we’ll finally meet Felicité?” Suddenly Enjolras is pressed in against him, ear unashamedly close to the door.

“Only if they ever make it out of there,” Grantaire manages.

“What are the chances?”

“Very little.”

Someone pounds on the door and Enjolras tugs him away down the hall frowning. “You only ever grant us small chances,” he says.

“To be blunt, Bahorel loves going down on that woman. We may not see him for a week.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about, and you know it.”

“Vanity would have me answer, if only to fill the silence with words.”

“Words are something you’ll always grant – words and a glass.”

“To fill the gap of disbelief?” Grantaire smiles and doesn’t reach for Enjolras, pretends he doesn’t want Enjolras’s hands in his hair again or his cock in his mouth, that his certainty doesn’t make Grantaire yearn. “I’ll gladly use both, or if not gladly then quickly. What more should I want than fumes for rose-colored glass? Then I can bear to watch you all try to save this sorry world.”

“You might try enthusiasm for it,” Enjolras says. “Not this...apathy.”

The door opens behind them and Bahorel comes out grinning. “Oh, Grantaire can be _very_ enthusiastic,” he drawls. “He’s of my club.”

“Worship where worship is due – it’s a calling,” says a husky voice rich with laughter, and it turns out that they do get to meet Felicité after all.

*

It’s not like Courfeyrac doesn’t wear leather pants all the time. He’s Courfeyrac; being gleefully sinuous is what he _does_. It’s just that on nights when Raise the Flag has a gig, he wears them with particular menace.

Grantaire rubs the bridge of his nose as they sit in the Musain’s front room, and Courfeyrac smiles more widely than is strictly necessary. “Not in the mood tonight?”

“You ask a lot of us.”

Courfeyrac’s face is solemn, and he lays his hand over his heart. “Only that we all give as brothers.”

“Brothers, really?”

“Just because some of us are more willing than others to approach the object of our affection –”

“Or _objects_ , plural,” Grantaire says; Courfeyrac always finds at least one person to go home with after a show, and often more.

“You might try it,” Courfeyrac says seriously. “He thinks rather more of you than you know.”

Grantaire shakes his head.

What’s not fair, he thinks later right before he throws himself into the pit, is how Enjolras is too much an ideal to be a man: combat boots that have seen wear, dark jeans as tight as any Musichetta’s ever lauded on Joly, a lip-ring like a badge on a smirk that could incite a riot, and none of it is pretense.

Enjolras screams his fury.

Grantaire goes in.

This is what he needs. This is why Joly brought him here. The pit brings him back to himself when his head is too loud.

Enjolras grabs the microphone and pushes the stand over in a screech of feedback and flings himself into the crowd, arms stretched. They all, even Grantaire, lift their hands to hold him, help him, and on his way passed back to the stage Enjolras sings like a hymn as they raise him, “Faith from desolation, help us to the future, help us,” dropping to a whisper as the chords fade away.

The room is hushed.

The last note ends and he jumps from their shoulders, using Grantaire as a lever to land on his feet, his palm sliding against Grantaire’s chest. He looks him up and down, grins wickedly, and bounds back on stage.

“We are Raise the Flag,” he says, “and this is our fight. And citizens,” he bares his teeth right at Grantaire, undulates, “we use every tool we can.”

The energy changes. The pit still seethes but the violence in the room is charged with sex. Grantaire lets the feel of the crowd in, dances, knows he’s not the only one breathing in time. He thinks _please_ and Enjolras is guttural, deep, low. Bodies glance off of Grantaire and he is forced to be here, to be in this pit in this moment. The music is hard and fast. He opens.

The bass is like getting fucked.

*

Afterward he’s slumped against the wall, breathing hard with his eyes closed as his friends get ready to leave.

“Are you well?” Enjolras asks.

Grantaire opens his eyes. “Let me stay here awhile yet,” he says.

Enjolras is taller than him, and stands very close. “You give all of yourself to the pit, every time.”

“It’s little enough to give.” Grantaire breathes deeply. Enjolras smells like sweat and Grantaire wants nothing so much as to lick his throat.

Enjolras steps in closer. “You won’t fight for what we do, but you come to every show.”

Grantaire shrugs. “I told you. I like to hear you preach.”

“I’m not a priest,” Enjolras says.

“You can’t expect me to believe you’re just a man.”

“Only that.”

Everyone else has left. It’s hot in the Musain. Sweat gathers at the base of Grantaire’s spine. The wall is rough through his thin shirt.

Enjolras presses against him slowly, deliberately, using all of his height. “Is this something you want?”

Grantaire closes his eyes again. “Very much,” he says.

Enjolras tangles an elegant hand in Grantaire’s hair and he pulls. “Be here,” he says. “Grantaire. Be _here_.” He splays his other hand along Grantaire’s jaw, tilts it up, kisses Grantaire’s neck and his fingers tighten. 

“Where else would I be?” Grantaire doesn’t open his eyes, but he moves against Enjolras.

“I don’t know.” Enjolras sounds amused, and turns Grantaire’s head so he can kiss behind his ear. “Wherever you go when you walk away from us.”

He leans back then and Grantaire’s eyes flutter open. He’s bereft, almost sways forward before he catches himself. Enjolras is looking at him critically – no, at his own handiwork.

“I want to bite you,” he says. “How do you feel about that?”

“I’d like it,” Grantaire says, and Enjolras turns Grantaire’s head back the other way, and scrapes his teeth over Grantaire’s neck.

Grantaire still has his hands pressed flat against the wall; he doesn’t know where he’s allowed to touch, _if_ he’s allowed to touch, what Enjolras might want of him –

“You’re a puzzle,” Enjolras tells him. “Is this the only place where you won’t talk?”

“I’ll do anything,” Grantaire says honestly. “But I don’t know what you want.”

“Oh, well,” it’s said flippantly, like Enjolras isn’t hard too, like Grantaire can’t feel him, and he smiles his rogue’s smile, the one Grantaire would follow if only because Enjolras means everything behind it, “everything you’ll give me.”

Grantaire’s knees hit the floor so fast he leans forward automatically, an act of balance almost as much as desire. Enjolras’s hand on his head stops him. “I think, maybe –” Enjolras says, and reverses them, steps around Grantaire to lean against the wall and he turns Grantaire toward him with the hand in his curls lightly tugging.

Grantaire looks at Enjolras’s thick dark boots on the Musain’s dusty floor, at how far the distance is between their soles and his own worn and faded jeans.

“I’m still not an ideal,” Enjolras says softly. He unbuttons his fly with his free hand.

Grantaire disagrees. This is just another way for Enjolras to be a flame. His cock is beautiful, long and hard, and when Grantaire leans forward the smell is a heady thing.

“Go on,” Enjolras says.

Grantaire keeps his hands on his knees, and Enjolras holds his cock for Grantaire; Grantaire licks over his fingers first, and then up his cock. He looks up just once, pulling against Enjolras’s hand in his hair, and Enjolras has his head back against the wall, eyes shut and throat bared.

Grantaire swallows around Enjolras’s cock. He knows this for what it is: an act of worship on his part, an allowance on Enjolras’s. He tugs against Enjolras’s fingers again and goes as deep as he can. He loves this, the taste and the hard floor under his knees, that everything in this moment is also an anchor. He rubs the palm of his hand against his own cock.

“You’re getting off on this,” Enjolras says, his eyes open now.

Grantaire pulls off long enough to say, “You often speak things that are very obvious,” and takes a minute to lean against Enjolras’s thigh.

Enjolras pets him lightly and lets him breathe, and then he gets his fingers twisted back in Grantaire’s curls and pulls him back to his cock. “Touch yourself, then,” Enjolras says. “Please.”

He does. Grantaire is caught and held in this moment, in this place, by the pleasure of his own hand on his cock and by the pleasure of service. He’s caught by Enjolras’s beautiful hands, carved like a saint’s but warm where they slide against his lips and where Enjolras now gently touches his face. Enjolras comes and Grantaire swallows eagerly, and the taste is something more that he loves, and he comes from his own hand and from all the rest of it together.

He stays with his head pressed against Enjolras’s thigh until Enjolras pulls him up, places him against the wall and starts straightening Grantaire’s clothing, his hair. Enjolras touches his face again, even more gently this time, and tilts his chin up and kisses him, a benediction.

*

Grantaire wakes in Enjolras’s bed, certain last night was the kind of dream that hurts more than a nightmare.

Enjolras smiles at him and asks, “Will you talk now?”

“Let me show you the city,” Grantaire answers.

They start at L’Harmattan, the record of so much that France has done wrong. Enjolras browses through the tall stacks in every room, Caribbean books and Southeast Asian books and North African books: everywhere the history of French conquest and repression. Grantaire stays in the poetry section, but it’s much the same.

They go to the Musée du Moyen Âge, and Grantaire holds Enjolras’s hand and tugs him past the tapestries (“I don’t care for most art,” Enjolras says on the way) to a backroom, to the stone Heads of the Kings of Judah. “More like their dust,” Grantaire says. “Breathe deep, ye mighty, and despair.”

Enjolras breathes in the thick sun-and-dust smell of the air as commanded, and says, “Grantaire, do you think I have a problem with headless monarchs?”

“These aren’t our monarchs,” Grantaire tells him. “Their heads decorated Notre Dame until the Revolution, and the ill-educated people thought them kings of France – Enjolras, they’re from the Bible, and they were hacked from the cathedral face and sold for scrap. They were found buried in a garden in 1977. There’s very little of Eden there. Well may the Bible be buried, I’m no man for a prophet, but your rebellions hurt people and you call it expected damage; they hurt art and thus our history, and maybe you’ll care about _that_.”

“I don’t call it expected damage,” Enjolras says. “Accepted deaths when they shouldn’t be, innocent lives –”

“No one is innocent.”

The room is warm and well lit though the atmosphere is close, and Enjolras draws back a little from Grantaire. “You know what I am,” he says. “What are you trying to prove?”

“I wonder if you know what I am, that’s all. I’m trying to think how you’ve missed it.”

They go to the Marais next, crossing the Rue de la Cité and looking at Notre Dame. Grantaire still doesn’t like Our Lady, but that’s not the point. They wait through the line outside the bright yellow facade of Sacha Finkelsztajn’s, and richer by knishes go to the Tuileries. 

“What I think,” says Enjolras, “is that you know all the best parts of the city along with all the worst, but you can’t see the one for the other.”

“La beauté est dans la rue?” Grantaire asks. “You have a song called ‘Staircase of Cobblestones;’ what do you mean by that? You’ll throw them, futile, until you have enough to climb?”

“Only that we must pile them to ascend to the future.” Enjolras smiles like he’s made a joke, but Grantaire can’t laugh.

“Haven’t you seen these streets we’ve been walking down? We’re in one of the richest parts of the city –” he gestures at the wide boulevard, “and these people _don’t care_ that the banlieues are burning.” 

“The arc of a cobblestone thrown is graceful,” Enjolras says. He’s wholly untroubled by anything Grantaire says, and Grantaire is desperate.

“Quoting your own song doesn’t make the point stronger,” he says.

“Grantaire, can’t you see they’re the same thing? You still think I don’t agree with you. The truth is I _do_ , but I also know we can be greater. This –” he mimics Grantaire’s gesture and takes in the centuries of lives that have walked here before them, “and every other street too, the people in them – this _is_ what’s beautiful. What’s –” he pauses, and looks like he’s bracing himself for Grantaire’s derision, like he doesn’t yet know that he won’t ever get that, “holy.”

Grantaire smiles crookedly. “Nothing new under the sun, that’s what I’ve learned by wandering. I can eat Basque food in la Butte aux Cailles and be transported to the Spanish painters in the Louvre, and of course the Musée Picasso is only a few steps away, and then at day’s end I find myself watching the sun set from the steps of Sacré Cœur – and would any man but you blame me for ignoring _The Frugal Repast_ when I see the picnics spread before me? Enjolras, you’ll never ask to see my etchings after this. Anaïs Bazin tells us the flâneur is the sovereign of Paris, but you’re not a man for kings. The basilica is to expiate the crimes of the Commune, but it's famed for its beauty. Revolution is forgotten for fine marble.”

Enjolras shakes his head. “I won’t see it like you do,” he says. “And I still want to see your etchings. What else do you want to show me?”

“Only the inside of my own head,” Grantaire says. They’ve come to the Orangerie at the end of the gardens, where Napoleon III used to keep his orange trees and the Third Republic its soldiers, and where now France keeps her greatest Monets.

“I wouldn’t have thought you for serene nature scenes,” Enjolras says. He wrinkles his nose as they walk through oval rooms designed to hold the artist’s largest murals, the same pond done in every season and every light. “What’s his point? It’s all very pretty, but not much more than that.”

“No,” Grantaire says. He holds Enjolras by the sleeve and leads him downstairs. “See this?” He points at crooked houses on a hill, fantastical and writhing. “These are Soutine; this is what I see in the city.” He points at desolate trees and feels sick.

Enjolras shakes Grantaire from his sleeve and takes his hand instead. They look at the paintings together for a long time, Enjolras brushing his thumb over Grantaire’s knuckles. When they leave, they sit above the Seine on the Pont de la Concorde and watch the city go by, leaning against each other, still holding hands.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from “I Am Afraid of Fire” by Anna Swir, translated by Czeslaw Milosz in _[Against Forgetting](http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5688)_. The closest version I can find online is [here](http://books.google.com/books?id=h2qsBYOcJfQC&pg=PA296&lpg=PA296&dq=anna+swir+i+am+afraid+of+fire+czeslaw+milosz+why+am+i+so+afraid&source=bl&ots=y17RXO8up-&sig=F9giOeyL2z1wNWwOxYQ6CUD8Hnc&hl=en&sa=X&ei=zlC1Uu6MHpPjoATFt4LABA&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=anna%20swir%20i%20am%20afraid%20of%20fire%20czeslaw%20milosz%20why%20am%20i%20so%20afraid&f=false).
> 
> [A post](http://barricadeur.tumblr.com/post/58182080204/bahorel-the-flaneur) by [barricadeur](http://barricadeur.tumblr.com/) got me thinking about what kind of layered histories too-sad-to-be-a-proper-flâneur Grantaire would see. [Baudelaire wrote](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaneur) that for “the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite...to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world...Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd.”
> 
> A lot of this fic was crowd-sourced. The red leather pants are [ark](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ark)’s, Felicité was named by [barricadeur](http://archiveofourown.org/users/barricadeur), eagle puns were sight-unseen approved by [sath](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sath) (sorry about that, babe), and _Citizens!_ is thanks to [acaramelmacchiato](http://archiveofourown.org/users/acaramelmacchiato). I cried a lot to tumblr while I was writing, and everyone was incredibly lovely.
> 
> Sacré Cœur was [funded to “expiate the crimes”](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacr%C3%A9-C%C5%93ur,_Paris#Basilique_of_the_Sacr.C3.A9_C.C5.93ur) of the [Paris Commune of 1871](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_commune). [L'Harmattan](http://www.librairieharmattan.com/) is a great bookstore that focuses on literature from the French-speaking post-colonial world. Woody Guthrie, [original punk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDd64suDz1A), famously had “[this machine kills fascists](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51FTLIlVUCL.jpg)” written on his guitar. _[The Frugal Repast](http://0.tqn.com/d/arthistory/1/0/z/-/1/picasso-met-2010-05.jpg)_ is an etching at the Musée Picasso. The Orangerie has a wonderful Soutine collection, including _[Le village](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-45B_dq9Fjuo/UfBSLh2YoEI/AAAAAAAAANg/zNoEPQm68Lo/s1600/chaim_soutine_village.jpg)_ , _[Arbre couché](http://gsepton.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/img_4132.jpg)_ , and _[Paysage](http://a403.idata.over-blog.com/5/03/81/57/Dossier-1/Soutine/Paysage.JPG)_.


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